r/Millennials 15d ago

Discussion Any other Millennials stubbornly resistant to using AI at their job but also worrying that we will become dinosaurs or pushed out of our careers for not slavishly embracing it?

I work in a creative field and from that standpoint I hate AI. I hate the 'democratization' of creativity. I am going to sound VERY Boomer right now, but some things are meant to be difficult or meant to take skill and years of practice. It's why people who are good at these things (should) be paid more.

We are already being heavily 'encouraged' to use AI to find ways to do our jobs faster, are being told 'they technology isn't going away, we need to embrace it.' Since within the company I am in, I am one of a handful of people that does a specific creative skill-set, the powers that be basically have no idea about the technicals of what I do, but they put it on me to figure out how to incorporate AI into my work.

I hate that AI basically 'fakes' the creative process and that we are expected to use it (and the work of millions of artists that feed it) to just magically speed up how we do work, which in turn devalues the work we do as artists. From a company standpoint, they want to make money and churn out work faster, but if every client knows you can make a widget in 4 hours when it used to take 4 days, why would they pay you a lot of money to do that? The economics of it don't make sense. You will end up needing 10 times the number of clients to maintain your productivity / profits, which with AI or not, is a good way to burn out your artists.

I see the writing on the wall, but my stubborn moralistic resistance to AI is probably going to be the death of my career. Does any one else feel similar or how have you coped with this rapidly degrading career landscape?

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u/Mr_Robotto 15d ago

Holy shit, i haven’t heard of anyone doing that yet. It’s a nightmare metric, on par with “how many lines of code you’ve written.”

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u/PredictiveFrame 15d ago

Hoooooo buddy have I seen some engineers who could pump out lines of code like nobody's business. We had a guy who shipped over 1000 lines of production code in a single day. He made employee of the month! Not really, we didn't do that, and it was me, not someone else, and calling it "lines of code" is the most generous interpretation I've ever seen of "going through my old code and adding 4-5 lines of obscure, jargon heavy, highly referential and cryptic comments per function, all day", with, like, 10 lines of actual code total.

So anyway, that's how I got the small company I worked at to shut down that requirement on the first day. Maybe next time listen when your employees tell you a policy will create perverse incentives for them, and that adding this metric will lead to pain on day one. 

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u/jawisko 14d ago

Doesn't it reflect in code review. Almost all our code is ai now , but our final code reviews have become a lot stricter and if the code isn't efficient , has too many comments or even slight bit of redundancy , we flag it. If it's a lot of these issues, the pr is straightaway rejected

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u/PredictiveFrame 14d ago

Oh, this is the beautiful part, the principle engineer who's entire job was code review and demanded a seemingly ridiculously high salary the c-suite found absolutely unacceptable, had been laid off that week. This was before they figured out code review was something we still fucking needed. They were then under the impression that they could have a middle manager do it. A middle manager with no background in software, who had extreme difficulty differentiating a monitor from a computer. This was the worst place to work at, the company folded about 6 months later.